Via press release we receive word that the first part of John Way’s top-down zombie survival RPG I Shall Remain is now available to download for free. The prologue is available for all on IndieDB, weighing in at just under a gig. Originally a Kickstarter effort that fell short of its goal, the lack of funding didn’t deter the Way’s team from going forward with the project, and now we have the first of those fruits with supposedly more in the works. Good on them I say.

Sometimes, a game just fails to sell. My first exposure to Keldyn Interactive’s age-of-sail zombie masher Dead Meets Lead was via our own site here. And after that? Nothing. It’s entire existence flew under the radar for most after it’s release last year. It also completely failed to sell, despite a strong showing at the Swedish Game Awards. Now, at the end of a long and troubled road and after a rather damning postmortem, the developers are disbanding and releasing the game as freeware.

In a year when Dungeons of Dredmor was released, and Dungeon Crawl ascended to new heights, Tales of Maj’Eyal (aka TOME 4) won the hearts of dungeon crawlers in the ASCII Dreams Roguelike Of The Year awards, and was voted best of 2011. What makes this sleeper hit such a big deal, winning over even the most hardened of loot-hoarders and monster-mashers, and usurping the would-be-king that was Dredmor? Find out after the break in our freeware pick of the day.

With all the rage surrounding the all the many, many bundles that we’ve been encountering over the last few months it only seemed to make sense that the very word bundle would become an appropriate tool to use for gamers who simply want to direct others to some very amazing games, paid or otherwise.

By all common logic, this game shouldn’t exist. A joke sketch from a Japanese image-board gets mocked, and then adopted by an english-speaking team, and adapted slowly over time into a full-length romantic visual novel. After five years in development, this bizarre project is finally complete, after a successful demo release last year which even resulted in a translation back into Japanese for a growing number of fans over there. Today, Katawa Shoujo is released.

If you’ve ever fantasised about traveling back through time and considered how, in practice, it might actually work then Void is the game for you. It came to my attention a couple of weeks ago via those learned souls over at Rock Paper Shotgun, but only yesterday did I manage to sit down and actually play the bally thing.

What if I told you could play a game where you got to write small functions, like you would in a programming language? You’d probably tell me something like: “We already have that Mazen, it’s called a programming language.” I would then give you a stern look for ruining my pitch and continue by saying: “What if it was a game where you had to write programs by moving a robot through various tiles with commands on them and carrying out arithmetic functions in creative ways?” I imagine at this point you’d look at the floor and shuffle your feet awkwardly. But we’d get past it when you started playing Robot Unlock.

What better way to kick off the final week before Christmas than with a free game? This time I’m bringing you guys a game called Deity which was created by a student game company called Double++ from DigiPen… that’s how you know it’s gonna be good!

Earlier this month it was announced by Ishisoft that veteran XBox Live indie hero, Johnny Platform, had finally made his way onto PC as a festive gift to desktop gamers. The title, released back in 2009 on the Microsoft console, sees the little java junkie battling to save Christmas over one hundred levels. Best of all? It’s absolutely free.

Alright guys, prepare to set apart the next 100 or so hours of your life to the side. I’m sorry to have to do this to you, but it’s my job. In any case, I’ve just stumbled upon Epic Inventor a free-to-play RPG/RTS platformer that allows you to build your own cities, NPCs, turrets, robots, etc. by mining gathering resources. Much in the same way Terraria works, actually, but don’t be confused because Epic Inventor does a few things differently as well.